I picked up a copy of William Saroyan’s The Secret Story for fifty cents. No doubt out of print now, this copy must have been sold on a drugstore rack. I paid double the original book cost: one whole quarter. Check out the garish cover below. It’s so slutty I’m a little embarrassed to be seen reading it on the elementary school playground.

The novel, however, is classic Saroyan, and for anyone who loves Saroyan that means exquisite. The story has a tender appreciation for its characters, particularly its children, who often figure prominently in Saroyan stories and are never trivialized or portrayed as naive. The underlying adult relationships, however, are rife with sin — greed and lust and unfulfilled desire — often cataclysmically playing out.

When I learned to knit sweaters, every time I saw someone in a handknit sweater who was amenable to undressing a bit, I asked to have that sweater handed over. Then I turned the garment inside out and ran my hands and eyes over the knitting and seaming, to figure out how the sweater was created. Likewise, with writing, I can’t help but turn a novel inside out. How is this piece of writing put together? In this Saroyan novel, I immediately noticed the vocabulary is simple, just a handful of words really. A well-placed image of weeds in an irrigation ditch comes and goes with the characters: nothing flashy or show-offy, merely a ditch one-fifth full of water, and remarking whether or not to dredge weeds from the ditch. The writing relies heavily on characters revealing themselves through their own dialogue, distinctive and natural to each character.

Yet, reading this novel is like journeying down into a very deep pond, clear and transparent at the surface, increasingly murky and filled with microscopic, teeming life as the journey progresses.

David Budbill’s advice to himself is:

Never be deliberately obscure. Life is difficult enough. Don’t add to the confusion.

A word again on that cover. How I wish novels were still a quarter a book. Wouldn’t we all read more? The Secret Story is a racy story, filled with illicit desire, a scandalous pregnancy, a husband’s rage. But aren’t we drawn to those elements because wild desire is part of our human world? Isn’t plot — story — one of the most engrossing elements of who we are? Why not revel in story? Why not seek our own redemption through story? Why not love reading?

Like this:

LikeLoading...

About Brett Ann Stanciu

A writer and sugarmaker, Brett Ann lives with her two daughters in stony soil Vermont. Her novel HIDDEN VIEW was published by Green Writers Press in the fall of 2015.
Let my writing speak for itself.

My Book

Follow this blog.

“With vivid and richly textured prose, Brett Ann Stanciu offers unsparing portraits of northern New England life well beyond sight of the ski lodges and postcard views. The work the land demands, the blood ties of family to the land, and to each other, the profound solitude that such hard-bitten lives thrusts upon the people, are here in true measure. A moving and evocative tale that will stay with you, Hidden View also provides one of the most compelling and honest rural woman’s viewpoint to come along in years. A novel of singular accomplishment.” – Jeffrey Lent

“Early in the book, I was swept by a certainty of truths in Hidden View: that Stanciu knew the bizarre and fragile construction that people’s self-deceptions can frame. And that she was telling, out in public, against all the rules, the heartbreaking story of far too many women I’ve known, at one time or another, who struggled to make their dreams come to reality in situations…. …(In Hidden View) the questions of loyalty to person, commitment to dreams, and betrayal of the helpless are as vivid as the flames in the sugarhouse, as sweet and dangerous as the hot boiling maple sap on its way to becoming valuable syrup. There’s so much truth in this book that at some point, it stops being “fiction” and stands instead as a portrait, layered, complex, and wise. The Vermont that we love, the farms that we treasure, the children we nurture are fully present.” – Kingdom Books, Beth Kanell

“Stanciu is a Vermonter’s ‬writer. Anyone who loves the landscape and language of Vermont will be ‬drawn into this story, but her writing holds a universal appeal, too, ‬and rings true with the language and landscape of the human heart and ‬mind as well. The characters in Hidden View are people you’re ‬going to think about, and care about, long after the book is read.” – Natalie Kinsey-Warnock, AS LONG AS THERE ARE MOUNTAINS

"Brett Stanciu writes with enviable poise and precision. Hidden View is a story that burrows deep and stays put. This is a powerful novel."
– Ben Hewitt, THE TOWN THAT FOOD SAVED and
HOME GROWN

"(Stanciu") combines her academic life with her agricultural life to write an enduring story… as rugged as the earth it is based on."
– Steve Pappas, The Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus, Vermont Sunday Magazine

"Stanciu is Vermont through and through. The same can be said of her first novel...”
– Seven Days

"Hidden View is pure authenticity. Every word rings true to this place and its people; I know; I've lived here for 45 years."
– David Budbill, JUDEVINE